Language of Dolls

Language of Dolls is an original collaborative theater piece by veteran downtown performers Lizzie Olesker, Peggy Pettitt and Louise Smith. After forty-plus years of knowing each other, we embarked on a series of intentionally candid and at times, difficult conversations about our identities as one Black woman and two white women. Now in our seventies, we wanted to unravel the subtle and overt ways that systemic racism has entered our lives and most intimate relationships. We recorded and transcribed these conversations which revealed more than we knew or expected of each other. A visit to the exhibit Black Dolls at The New York Historical Society profoundly affected the direction and focus of our collaborative exploration. The Black dolls we witnessed, made in the 19th and early 20th century, spoke to us in their haunting, silent presence. The dolls’ hidden histories inspired us to create our own “soul dolls” from found materials, discovering how each one possessed a language of poetic possibility–a Language of Dolls. Following each performance, audience members may participate in a guided conversation about the issues and questions that the piece raises for them. What messages around race have we received from the time we were born and carried throughout our lives? How do harmful, racialized images and daily experiences become internalized projections? How does our interconnectivity as friends, artists, healers, and storytellers help us resist rigid categorizations? How do we stay at the table through our differences to have difficult but necessary conversations? Language of Dolls is presented In Collaboration with New Georges, an artist service program and active partnership with artists in which New Georges helps steward artist-driven independent productions of new works we love, with support from Venturous Theater Fund.